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<p>FriAMsketeers and Correspondents en Ineffablia -</p>
<p>I am traveling in Sweden right now where every other young man I
meet is named "Torbjorn" which roughly translates to
"Thunder-Bear" or more specifically "god-of-thunder/bear". In
every case, I actually do feel as if I have spoken with a God and
a Bear... it is in the ineffable quality that separates our
cultures and our generations (they are mostly of the X/Z), and the
things that are hard to say the same way in both Swedish or
English or as we mostly use "Svenglish". <br>
</p>
<p>My geneology says I am from Germany/Poland/Scotland but my DNA
says I am 95% Scandanavian and 5% North African... not a hint of
Neanderthal, and I do not believe anyone has sequenced the
Sasquatch/Yeti, so how would we know about that? I did see a
cousin to the Loch Nesse monster yesterday, but it was a sculpture
made of scrap Iron, or that was how I interpreted it, it might
have been Ouroborous herself. Perhaps the fondness for adding
wild mushrooms to the borscht here has something to do with all of
these visions?</p>
<p>Merle has arranged the meetings here regarding the acute
implications of the Anthropocene... nominally the Climate and
Complexity Science. Stephen and Stu were the "headliners" from the
Santa Fe contingent . I call it The END of the Anthropocene
(if/when/as we drive off a cliff of our own making) or "A Grand
Unified Theory of Endogenous Existential Threats" (tongue planted
obliquely in cheek). We did do our part to rush the upheaval of
sequestered Dino-carbon into the atmosphere to the tune of 3-4
tonne each, so go figure? I also stopped in at Parliament to
channel Greta last Friday... I turned the "AT" in my "Make
America Great Again" cap upside down so it now reads "Make America
GreTA Again" which seems ever more grounded and hopeful than what
we have been up to these past few years... <br>
</p>
<p>I also have been meeting with Steen Rasmussen in Copenhagen (an
early ALife colleague some of you may know) and one of the
founders of Mapillery in Maimo. Both live as if they want to
prevent an Abrupt End of the Anthropocene, as many here seem to
do. Public transportation is very good and with the apparently
warmed climate, what should be dead of winter feels more like a
cold Springtime. Bicycles in the cold rain everywhere. Next I
move forward to Amsterdam where I will visit our own Jenny
Quillien and the current correspondent Dave West where we will
either speak to God, a Bear, or perhaps just Eat Spaghetti... in
the reflection of the shadow of the presence of the spirit of
Christopher Alexander. Throughout the entire visit I expect there
will be an ineffability he would call "the quality without a
name". We will probably not speak of it, and rather speak "of
Cabbages and Kings" or Humpty Trumpty and all his horses and women
who will patently not put anything together again.</p>
<p>Jet lag leads to sleep deprivation which in fact seems to enhance
my awareness the ineffable. And FriAMPhilosophy only adds to
that.</p>
<p>Carry On!<br>
</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12/12/19 5:15 AM, Eric Charles
wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr">I think the effableness is a red herring. "Last
night I ate spaghetti" doesn't fully and completely explain
exactly what happened last night... but we all agree that I used
words to describe a thing that is not "ineffable". So far, no
argument has been offered to demonstrate that Dave's
conversation with God is any more or less effable than my having
eaten spaghetti. Absent an argument to that effect, we are
begging the question by taking it as given that the two differ.
I think the more interesting issue that Dave's example brings up
is our original issue regarding monism, in its relation to the
question "what is real?"
<div><br>
</div>
<div>We all agree that that Dave could have been having a
conversation with something real or something not real, right?
We can call the other option "imaginary" or "illusory" or
whatever else we want to call it, but we recognize that people
sometimes have conversations with those types of
conversational partners, so it is a live possibility.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I said in prior emails, we are in-particular talking about
"monism" in contrast to mind-matter dualism (and all variants
of that particular dualism), meaning that we reject that
mental things and matter things are made of two different
stuffs.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>So Dave is talking to God. Whether he is talking to
something that is "mental" or something "physical" is a
post-hoc judgement. That is, we discover that based on
future experience, not based on the initial experience,
which is neutral with regards to that distinction. What
later experiences will allow us to determine if the
conversational partner is real? That is hard to specify when
we are discussing a deity with ambiguous properties, but the
method must be in principle very similar to how we would
confirm or reject the reality of any other conversational
partner. How do you determine when a child has an imaginary
friend versus a real friend? You look for other consequences
of the conversational partner. Ultimately we look for
convergent agreement by anyone who honestly inquires into
the existence of the conversational partner (i.e., the long
term convergence / pattern-stability, referenced earlier in
the conversation). The only thing we can't allow - because
it is internally incoherent - is for there to exist a "real"
thing with "no consequences" that we could investigate. So
the "Deist" God, the instigator with no current effects, is
off the table a priori, because that is a description of a
thing that doesn't exist --- and also because Dave couldn't
have had a conversation with that. We could only be
discussing a conception of God that can be interacted with
to certain ends, which means that some tractable means of
converging opinions one way or the other is possible. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>As such: Dave's conversation with God is not in-kind
difference from John's seeing a bear in the woods: Both are
equally effable/ineffable. Both have the same question about
the reality of the thing experienced. Both can be subjected
to the same types of analyses (I offered Peircian, Jamesian,
or Holtian options regarding the bear). </div>
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<div dir="ltr">-----------<br>
<div dir="ltr">Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.<br>
Department of Justice - Personnel <span>Psychologist</span></div>
<div>American University - Adjunct Instructor</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 3:17
PM uǝlƃ ☣ <<a href="mailto:gepropella@gmail.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">gepropella@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">The
thing being left out of this still seems, to me, to be
constructive vs ... what? ... analytical explanation. Your
larger document beats around that bush quite a bit, I think.
But I don't think it ever names/tackles the point explicitly.
<br>
<br>
When you say things like "explanations are based on prior
explanations" and "depends on the understandings that exist
between speaker and audience", you're leaving out THE
fundamental ontology atop which it's all built ... the
building of the experimental apparatus. Feynman's pithy
aphorism applies: What I cannot create, I do not understand.<br>
<br>
Explanations facilitate replication. They tell you *how* to do
the trick yourself. Descriptions can be explanatory, of
course. But they can also be non-explanatory. And some
explanations are more facilitating than others. (E.g. I can
write out some obtuse math and print it on paper or I can hand
you a floppy disk with some Matlab code on it.)<br>
<br>
But the foundation is that we all have the same basic
hardware. And *that's* what explanations are built upon.
Change the hardware and your explanation becomes mere
description. ... E.g. take a big hit of LSD and many
explanations become mere descriptions. The evolutionary
biological content of your paper (as well as Figure 1.2[†])
seems like it's just crying out for something like
"construction". Reading it feels like watching someone
struggle for a word that's on the "tip of their tongue".<br>
<br>
<br>
[†] In particular, if I replace "is the model for" with
*generates*, I get some sort of Necker cube flipping feeling.<br>
<br>
On 12/11/19 11:23 AM, <a
href="mailto:thompnickson2@gmail.com" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">thompnickson2@gmail.com</a> wrote:<br>
> [... the thought experiment being explaining an eraser
falling behind a book ...]<br>
> Working through thought-experiments like the one above
leads us to conclude that all descriptions, particularly
satisfying ones, are inevitably explanatory and that all
explanations are descriptive. And yet, you cannot explain
something until you have something to explain – so all
explanations must be based on prior descriptions. The only
reasonable conclusion, if you take both of these claims at
face value, is that all explanations are based on prior
explanations! The distinction between description and
explanation concerns their position in an argument, not their
objectivity or subjectivity in some enduring sense. Whether a
statement is explanatory or descriptive depends upon the
understandings that exist between the speaker and his or her
audience at the time the statement is made. /Descriptions are
explanations that the speaker and the audience take to be true
for the purpose of seeking further explanations/.[1]
<#_ftn1> <br>
<br>
<br>
-- <br>
☣ uǝlƃ<br>
<br>
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